EVERY Thursday evening the Prime Minister comes to the doorstep of Number 10 to clap NHS workers.

He, like everyone else, can see the huge contribution they have made over the past few weeks, from consultants down to the cleaners who are charged with one of the most important duties of them all: making sure that coronavirus does not spread within hospitals. Why, then, did it take the Government so long to come round to exempting the 88,000 non-EU nationals who work in the NHS from the annual £400 surcharge they have to pay to access healthcare? Until yesterday afternoon, ministers were not only insistent that the charge must stay - they were planning to jack it up to £624 from October.

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If it were just consultants on £100,000 a year who were being asked to pay, it wouldn't have mattered so much. But it is a fee that had to be paid even by porters, cleaners and caterers on the minimum wage. For many of them, the surcharge was swallowing up more than an entire week's earnings.

Boris Johnson told the Commons on Wednesday that the Government couldn't afford to lift the surcharge because it raises £900million. But that, it turns out, is the revenue earned from all foreign nationals over a period of four years. From the 88,000 non-EU nationals working in the NHS the surcharge has been raising a more modest £35million.

It is a sad comment on the Prime Minister's sense of judgment that it took the threat of a backbench rebellion to make him change his mind.

Johnson, of all people, should have known what bad feeling the surcharge was causing among NHS staff. It is only a few weeks ago that his life was saved by NHS staff at St Thomas' Hospital - including by two overseas nurses whom he singled out for praise. On Wednesday, he was forced to backtrack, too, on a plan to exclude low-paid foreign NHS workers from a Covid-19 bereavement scheme - but only after a cleaner, who is employed mopping up a ward full of patients suffering from the disease, posted a video on Twitter drawing attention to the unfairness of it all.

Just five months ago Mr Johnson won a solid election victory by showing how he was in touch with public feeling, especially in northern constituencies that had felt ignored for years. For now, that keen political antennae seems to have deserted him.

Of course money is tight - and will become ever tighter as the bill for the coronavirus crisis comes to be paid. And yes, in many cases we need to charge overseas visitors to use the NHS to deter health tourism.

But there are plenty of less deserving candidates who have been feasting on public money over the past few weeks - like Lord Fox, the Lib-Dem peer revealed yesterday to be getting furlough payments through his PR firm even though he is still being paid a daily fee of £162 for his House of Lords work.

It is true that the NHS has become too reliant on overseas staff, and that in doing so we are depriving developing nations of much-needed medical staff. But the way to make the NHS less dependent on foreign workers is to recruit and train more British citizens.

We simply haven't been training enough British doctors and nurses. Too many school-leavers are attracted to do fashionable university courses where there are very few job opportunities at the end of them. Only too late do they realise that could hugely have boosted their future earnings potential by studying medicine or nursing.

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In the meantime we should be cherishing anyone who is prepared to work in the NHS, wherever they are from - ancillary staff, too. Cleaning a hospital is pretty unglamorous work at the best of times.

But to be cleaning critical care wards when many of their occupants have been dying of an infectious disease, deserves special recognition.

Unveiling help for the economy back in March, Chancellor Rishi Sunak promised to "do whatever it takes" to help get the country through the coronavirus crisis. As a result, the Government's deficit this year looks as if it will balloon to over £300billion. It will be a huge drag on the economy for years. Paying off the bill will require many sacrifices, or we will hand the bill to future generations.

So, yes, it is right to keep a tight grip on public spending. But denying free healthcare to people who have been bravely running the hospitals that have been keeping people alive was no act of admirable fiscal prudence. It was mean-spirited and wrong and should not have required a Conservative rebellion to tell the Government so.